


Daisies

by sunalso



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: F/F, Hanahaki Disease, Season/Series 02, Willow & Oz Friendship, hanahaki
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-05
Updated: 2017-12-05
Packaged: 2019-02-11 00:11:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 995
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12923142
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sunalso/pseuds/sunalso
Summary: S2 AU. Willow is in the hospital after the vamp attack on the library, where it turns out she has a secret she can no longer hide. Buffy/Willow pairing, Willow & Oz friendship.





	Daisies

**Author's Note:**

> A/N: Set during Becoming, Part 2. In this verse, hanahaki is a known disease. Written as part of the 2017 Buffy Femslash Secret Santa exchange for @build-the-world-again who wanted Willow/Buffy, Hanahaki disease, and post S1. Happy Holidays! (Uh, sorry it came out so angsty) Beta’d by @robotgort

When you were young, you thought you were going to live forever. Or you were supposed to think that, anyway.

Willow smoothed the sheet of the hospital bed down over her legs. It’d been a long time since Willow had thought like that. Being friends with the Slayer meant you knew death was never too far away.

Friends.

Willow coughed weakly and spit out daisy petals into her hand. She stared at them.

“Here,” Oz said, helping her dump the petals into a Kleenex before throwing them in the trash.

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you.” Willow let her head slump back against the pillow. The flowers were choking her lungs. The bump to her head hadn’t been fatal, but the doctors said she only had a few days left, at most, before she wouldn’t be able to breathe.

Oz was leaning back in the chair beside the bed, eyes fixed on the ceiling. He’d been such a good friend. At one time she’d thought he’d be more, but something had been in the way. Something that had actually been a someone. An unexpected someone.

“How long have you been dealing with this on your own?” Oz asked.

“The flowers?”

He nodded.

“Since…since Angel became Angelus.” She shifted uneasily on the bed and wrapped her arms around her knees. “When she still loved him, even after, I knew I was never even going to be in the running.”

“Buffy,” Oz said.

Willow coughed, shoulders hunching as she shook from the force. When she was done, an entire daisy lay in her hand. She placed it on the bedside table.

“I didn’t mean to fall in love.” A hundred images of Buffy flashed through her mind. Happy ones, of Buffy smiling and laughing. One of Buffy treating Willow like she was a real person and not just a geeky joke of a wallflower. There wasn’t an instant Willow could pick out of all those that was the one when she’d crossed the line from loving Buffy Summers as a friend to being in love with her.

Willow turned on her side, away from Oz, as a fresh round of coughing wracked her body. She managed to spit the petals into a tissue on her own this time.

She should have said something, anything, about her feeling while there’d still been time, but then Angelus had shown up. All of Buffy’s beautiful smiles had vanished and her face had become etched with hard lines of pain. She’d given herself to someone she loved and received a monster in return. Since then, Buffy had been in a dark place, not one where she would want to hear that her best friend was in love with her. So, Willow had hid her feelings and hid the petals, until now, when there wasn’t any more hiding.

Only…Willow knew she could make things better. Not for herself, but for Buffy. If Angel had his soul back, then Buffy would get her smiles back.

Willow loved Buffy too much not to want to see her happy.

“I’m not going to do the surgery,” Willow said.

“What was that?” Oz asked.

Willow shakily pulled herself back upright. “I said I’m not going to do the surgery. Have Cordy bring the stuff for the spell. If I wait, it’ll be too late. I have to return Angel’s soul now.”

“But the doctors said you need to go immediately…Willow…you can’t die.”

“Buffy’s—” She broke off, coughing up another daisy, which she set beside the first. “She’s going to fight, and she knows she could die. She would die if it was the only way. But I can fix things, I can make her happy. I can give her Angel back. And if I’m the one who dies, well, I’m just a friend. It’s not like having to put a stake through Angel’s heart. She’d never be the same.”

“Willow, she wouldn’t want you to do this.”

“I know.” Willow held out her hand and Oz stood to take it. “Don’t tell her, okay? Say it was the bump on my head.” The overhead lights made her already pale skin look even paler. If she’d been allowed to choose, she wouldn’t have wanted to die in a grungy hospital room. She closed her eyes and imagined the daisies were not in her lungs, but growing in a sea of white and yellow that circled around where Buffy and she were sitting. Words weren’t needed. Buffy knew that Willow loved her, and Willow knew Buffy loved her in return. Buffy put her soft, warm hand on Willow’s cheek and leaned forward to press her lips against Willow’s.

A violent coughing fit caught Willow, not passing until a third daisy was lying beside the other two.

There was no more time for pretending.

Willow looked at Oz, who was still holding her hand. “If I let the doctors take this out of me…I wouldn’t love her anymore. Poof. Gone. I don’t want that. I need to know I made the world a better place for her.”

Oz closed his eyes, but he nodded, once. “I promise, she won’t know.”

“Thank you.”

Willow let go of Oz’s hand.

“I’ll go get Cordy and the supplies,” he said, not quite meeting Willow’s gaze.

“Better make it quick,” Willow said. The world was getting grayer around the edges.

“I will.” Oz bowed his head, turned, and walked out of the room, leaving her alone. Willow knew she was lucky to have the kind of friends she did. Oz would keep his word.

She reached out, trailing a finger over the soft petals of the daisies. She hoped that after she was gone, they’d plant a few beside her headstone. Even if Buffy never knew what the flowers meant, she could still visit Willow’s grave, hand in hand with Angel, and there the daisies would be, the evidence of Willow’s love for all the world to see.


End file.
